sacraconversazione.org

postmodern preaching

The Day of Pentecost (Principal Service) Year A

  • Act of the Apostles 2: 1-21

The Holy Spirit has made discrete, but critical appearances in Luke’s narratives to this point, but now takes center stage.  The occasion  is the Jewish Feast of Pentecost, the place is Jerusalem.  In it’s earliest traditions, the Feast of Weeks was timed to give thanks for the Spring Harvest.  Later it became a feast of thanksgiving for the sacred texts, which became the source of unity and identity for the Jews even in diaspora and desolation.  Luke’s narrative presents an occasion when Jews from all over the world would make pilgrimage to Jerusalem for this important feast.  On this particular Pentecost, coming just fifty days after the death and resurrection of Jesus, the disciples of Jesus are “all in one place” when a “violent wind” filled the “house” where they were gathered.  “Divided tongues, as of fire, appeared among them, and a tongue rested on each of them.”  Each and all of them “were filled with the Holy Spirit….”  The work of the Holy Spirit on this occasion was to enable each “to speak in other languages.”   Crowds of pilgrims filling the city from around the world on this major Feast are “amazed and astonished” to hear “in our own languages… them speaking about God’s deeds of power.”  When some question if these people are drunk, Peter steps forward to announce that they are witnessing the fulfillment of the prophet (Joel): “In the last days,” God declares, “I will pour out my Spirit upon all flesh”–  sons and daughters, young and old, slaves and free, women and men!  All this will be accompanied by all kids of violent disruption as if all creation were coming apart “before the company of the Lord’s great and glorious day.”  And, all “who call upon the name of the Lord shall be saved.”

OR

  • Numbers 11: 24-30

While the story of Moses’s sharing his leadership with “the seventy” is a re-telling based on Exodus 24: 1-11, this version from the Book of Numbers includes a unique twist.  Moses has just attempted to address the growing discontent among God’s people when  he gathers around him “seventy men” in a tent separate from the rest of the camp.  “Then the Lord came down in the cloud and spoke to him and took some of the spirit that was upon him and put it on the seventy elders; and when the spirit rested upon them, they prophesied.”   Apparently, this was a one-time event for the “seventy-men,” because the text continues, “But they did so no more.”  However, “two men,” Eldad and Medad, who had remained in the camp and had not been present with Moses and the “seventy men” had also had the spirit “rest” on them began to prophecy among the people.  Someone ran to the tent where Moses was and told him what was happening out among the people.  Joshua, Moses’ right-hand man and successor, asked Moses to stop them.  To which Moses replied: “would that all the Lord’s people were prophets.”

  • Psalm 104: 25-35, 37

The psalmist luxuriates in praise to God whose spirit sustains all creation.  But when God “looks at the earth,” it “trembles and the mountains smoke.”

  • I Corinthians 12: 3b-13

Paul tackles a paradox– the unity and the diversity of the church.  While acknowledging that there is the “same God” and the “same Spirit,” he also acknowledges at least four groups included in the early church who would have had the greatest social, cultural, political, legal and even religious differences– Jews and Greeks and slaves and free.

  • John 20: 19-23

It is evening of the first resurrection appearances of Jesus.  His followers are gathered in the room where they had shared a final supper just hours before he was arrested and taken away.  He appears among them, breathes on them and announces: “”Receive the Holy Spirit.”  In this act, Jesus extends and expands the work he had embodied.

OR

  • John 7: 37-39

Jesus is at another important Feast in the Jewish liturgical calendar, the autumn harvest feast of Tabernacles or Booths.  He uses the image of a stream.  He is the main stream from which smaller streams flow throughout the villages, great cities and fields of the whole earth, enabling life and growth.  He promises:  “Out of the believer’s heart shall flow rivers of living water.”

The Feast of Pentecost, with Christmas and Easter, are the heart and soul of the church’s liturgical calendar.  These are the highlight’s of the church’s story.  They are all linked.  While Pentecost certainly lacks the popular cultural and social customs surrounding the other two great feasts, Pentecost is integral to the complete meaning of ‘incarnation’ and ‘resurrection’.  It celebrates nothing less than  the claim that the work of God represented by Jesus, the Christ, and sustained by God’s Spirit is conveyed to those who chose to participate in this new reality.

The appointed texts point in a variety of distinct but complementary directions.  Here are three.

First, by the time of Luke, the importance Pentecost for Jews had become a celebration of the one gift from God that even the Roman Empire could not take away from God’s people when it destroyed the Temple and decimated the Jewish population of Jerusalem– the Sacred Texts; the word from God and the words about God.  Reading, studying, debating, memorizing, internalizing, singing, reciting, interpreting privately and publicly their meaning kept them in God’s presence.

A second direction today’s readings inspire is the emphasis on the continuation and expansion of God’s work in the world.  Accompanied by fire from above, as with the gift of the Torah and the extension of God’s spirit beyond Moses, the same sign now signals a new and expanded dimension.  Just as some of the ancient prophets had imagined/dreamed, God’s spirit was no longer limited to certain places, times and people.  Their dreams were coming true:  “Your sons and daughters shall prophecy, and your young men shall see visions and your old men shall dream dreams.”  “Would that all the Lord’s people were prophets.”  

A third emphasis is as timely today as when Paul tackled it in the beginning: the unity and the diversity in the church, the designated means for carrying out God’s work in the world.  At the core of the church is its unified  proclamation that God inaugurated and sustains all creation with one motive–love, and the baptized have a designated role to play in announcing and building that new structure.   But the understandings, interpretations and practices to implement that singular calling are as diverse as the baptized themselves.  Paul mentions four groups who would have had the least in common– Jews and Gentile, slave and free–, but insists that all are valid, necessary and mutually dependent for the health of the whole body.

So, how does God’s work get done in and through the church?  At the conclusion of her highly original and increasingly influential study of the first account of creation in Genesis, Face of the Deep: A Theology of Becoming, Catherine Keller concludes that the role of God’s Spirit  “…will not transcend or obliterate differences; rather differences are intensified precisely by being brought into relation.”  (p. 232)  Then citing Isaiah’s (42: 1-4) crucial link between God’s spirit and justice (which Matthew places at a dramatic point in the dawning awareness of the power of Jesus [12: 15ff] )– “I will pour my Spirit upon him, and he shall proclaim justice”– she emphasizes: “Justice is love under conditions of conflict.”  (p. 233)

The chaos of Pentecost does not obscure its unmistakable claim: God’s spirit is at work in the world wherever and in whomever it is embraced.  This settles nothing and opens up unimaginable  possibilities.

 In many different books over his long and fertile career, Jacques Derrida described the push/pull in which we are caught between the general and the particular, settled and unsettled, the “Babel and anti-Babel,” the religious and the irreligious, the Christian West and the non-Christian, as the dynamic that permanently opens what he called a “future messianicity,”  which is a permanent openness to future justice and a permanent dissatisfaction with the status quo.  

“Permanent openeness” means that the things of God are always coming to pass, never settled, never captured in one place or one time or in one language.  The final word is never said.  That is our bane and our blessing.  

Comments are closed.